das monde:

I do not read everything of Archdruid easily

He's no easy read, on any level! A notable sang-froid spiced with occasional bone-dry asides that use wit to stab the message further home, well it doesn't pander the reader.

Basically the price of entry is any hope you ever had of a happy ending, gloom expressed with rare elegance is the tone of all his posts. That said, he manages to make me chuckle in between groans...

Enlightened pessimism.

His writing has gravitas, but listening to him talk live he comes across less mature, a bit boyishly flippant. Common sense wrapped in a somewhat self-conscious brilliance, a polymath's love for learning and orthogonal thinking.

He has another blog on the Druidic side to his work which attracts a different set of commenters.

The level of commentary on both blogs is very sharp. The acid test of any blogger...

The Pragmatic Pagan. A rare voice, a strong signal in the minestrone of the Inter-Noise.

Feral Scholar-ish for intellectual loft, with less military stuff and more civilisation history.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

das monde:

Arnold Toynbee [...] has pointed out an intriguing difference between the way civilizations rise and the way they fall. On the way up, he noted, each civilization tends to diverge not merely from its neighbors but from all other civilizations throughout history.

One of the consequences of 'Western Civilization' haven risen so far and so fast is that it has also almost certainly evolved capabilities that will allow it to reconfigure itself in ways that can both be more personally satisfying to the entire population and more energy efficient at the same time. Propaganda has proven such a powerful tool that it is quite conceivable that a society could be converted to an orientation that favors reduced material and energy consumption in return for more equality and opprotunity for all.

What we need is a leader and a movement that can do for capitalism what Gorbechev did for Soviet Communism, but with better control of the direction that the transformation takes. Social orders are entirely human creations and no social order is but that the thinking of the population makes it so. It only took a little more than a quarter century for US wealthy elites to transform US society from one with a powerful central government and increasing equality to one where the central government has become the creature of elites and is being used to despoil the masses in the interests of the elites. (~1950 - 1980) It would seem that it should be possible to reverse that process even quicker that the time it took to create and put it to work.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."